After Pennsylvania (1)

During the contentious runup to the Pennsylvania primary, the polling numbers (national and statewide) hardly changed. A lot of commentators concluded that Obama’s Wright/Ayers/”bitter” troubles and the Clinton attacks based on them had had no effect, apart from driving Clinton’s negatives up faster than his. I’m no pollster—I have only the vaguest notion of what “internals” are—but I don’t believe it. I’m pretty sure that the onslaught levelled what otherwise would have been a steep upward curve for the big O.

The Times, in a surprisingly angry editorial (possibly reflecting the editorial board’s irritation at having been ordered to endorse Clinton), had this to say about what its headline called her “Low Road to Victory”:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

Amen. One may doubt, however, that the Clinton campaign will heed exhortations of this kind. Hillary and her lieutenants, many of them, have evidently persuaded themselves that (a) it is absolutely certain that Obama would lose in November and (b) they are courageously braving the squeamish disapproval of bien pensants such as the Times (and The New Yorker) by destroying him before he can lure the Democratic Party to disaster. To the extent that they sincerely believe this, they are acting in a kind of twisted good faith—the kind that often marks those who have got hold of an end they see as justifying almost any means.

Their backup justification is that they are performing a service to the Party and to Obama by toughening him up and giving him practice in parrying the Republican thrusts he would face as the nominee. And they are surely right that those thrusts would be nastier than the ones he has faced from the Clintons. The reasoning is that while Clinton is (to quote myself from this week’s Comment) “a seasoned survivor of the worst that the Republican attack machine can dish out,” Obama isn’t.

Or is she? Clinton has thrown her kitchen sink at him, but—for hardheaded as well as high-minded reasons—he has not thrown his at her. (I know—turning the other cheek got Jesus crucified. But it also got Montgomery’s buses integrated. And India liberated.)

Consider this.

In the Philadelphia debate, Clinton amplified ABC’s odious question about Bill Ayers by saying piously that Obama’s “relationship” with Ayers

continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York, and I would hope to every American, because they were published on 9/11 and he said that he was just sorry they [the Weather Underground] hadn’t done more [bombing].

(I should note here that Ayers’s “comments” were not among the things that New Yorkers—this New Yorker, anyway—found “deeply hurtful” that day. To the extent that we paid attention to them at all, we—I—found them contemptible, and we were—I was—grimly pleased that his long-dodged karma had, in a small way, caught up with him: his book tour was ruined.)

Hillary has her own vulnerability in this general area, and it is larger than the fact, mentioned by Obama in his riposte to her, that her husband, on his last day in office, commuted the sentences of a couple of old Weather Underground jailbirds. (After a decade and a half in stir, they had been denied parole, apparently unfairly. Good for Bill.) What Obama did not mention was Hillary’s internship, back in the groovy summer of 1971, at the Oakland law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. Treuhaft (Robert Treuhaft, husband of Jessica Mitford) had left the Communist Party thirteen years earlier, but Walker (Doris Walker) was still a member, and the firm was a pillar of the Bay Area Old Left. I assume that Obama didn’t mention this because doing so would have rightly pissed off a lot of Democrats, because he is running as a non-kneecapping uniter, and because there is no evidence that Clinton has or has ever had the slightest sympathy with Communism. (Of course, there is no such evidence with respect to Obama and Weather Underground-ism, either, but that didn’t stop Hillary from twisting that particular knife.)

My point is that Hillary Clinton has not, in fact, survived the worst that the Republican attack machine (and its pilotless drones online and on talk radio) can dish out. We will learn what the worst really means if she is nominated. The Commie law firm will be only the beginning. Many tempting targets—from Bill’s little-examined fund-raising and business activities during the past seven years to the prospect of his hanging around the White House in some as yet undefined role for another four or eight years to whatever leftovers from the Clinton “scandals” of the nineteen-nineties can be retrieved from the dumpster and reheated—remain to be machine-gunned. The whole Clinton marital soap opera, obviously off limits within the Democratic fold, will offer ample material for what Obama calls “distractions.” To take the most obvious example, the former President’s social life since leaving the White House will become, if not “fair game,” big game—and some of these right-wing dirtbags are already hiring bearers and trying on pith helmets for the safari. Is this a “there” where the Democratic Party really wants to go?

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.